Lone Gunman

Back in the day I used to spend a fair amount of time in var­i­ous IRC chan­nels. If you did too, you’ll feel a pang of nos­tal­gia read­ing the great quotes at Bash.org.

<Patrician|Away> what does your robot do, sam
<bovril> it col­lects data about the sur­round­ing envi­ron­ment, then dis­cards it and dri­ves into walls

I’ve always loved these quotes but also always for­get to book­mark them — never again!

IronChef Foicite: well, there’s a lot of rea­sons
IronChef Foicite: i mean, roses only last like a cou­ple weeks
IronChef Foicite: and that’s if you leave them in water
IronChef Foicite: and they really only exist to be pretty
IronChef Foicite: so that’s like say­ing
IronChef Foicite: “my love for you is tran­si­tory and based solely on your appear­ance“
IronChef Foicite: but a potato!
IronChef Foicite: potatos last for fuck­ing ever, man
IronChef Foicite: in fact, not only will they not rot, they actu­ally grow shit even if you just leave them in the sack
IronChef Foicite: that part alone makes it a good sym­bol
IronChef Foicite: but there’s more!
IronChef Foicite: there are so many ways to enjoy a potato! you can even make a bat­tery with it!
IronChef Foicite: and that’s like say­ing “i have many ways in which I show my love for you“
IronChef Foicite: and potatos may be ugly, but they’re still awe­some
IronChef Foicite: so that’s like say­ing “it doesn’t mat­ter at all what you look like, I’ll still love you”

Top 100, 101–200

That’s photoshop­ping to you, Mr Layman.

Yes­ter­day, Adobe released the long-awaited, online ver­sion of the cov­eted Pho­to­shop; Pho­to­shop Express. At first glance it looks impres­sive and offers many neat features.

Now before you go berserk, let us exer­cise some jour­nal­is­tic cau­tion — it’s not every­thing you can do in Pho­to­shop fit into a web browser. Not nearly.

No lay­ers here, no fancy pants mask­ing. But for 95% of your pho­tos, it offers pretty much all you need to fix ‘em up, and it does it with style.

Whether adjust­ing expo­sure, white bal­ance, or hue, touch­ing up blem­ishes, or dis­tort­ing your image, Pho­to­shop Express pro­vides an easy slider and thumb­nails to give you an instant pre­view of your image at var­i­ous set­tings. Even undo is bet­ter than you’d expect.

As one who occa­sion­ally needs to edit images while in work (on my lunch-break, natch), it looks like there will be some tough com­pe­ti­tion between Pho­to­shop Express and my cur­rent favourite online edi­tor, Pic­nik.

via Pho­to­jojo

Bruce Schneier recently wrote about the MySpace ‘safe­guards’ being put in place to pro­tect minors. His very suc­cinct clos­ing com­ments are a must-read.

…there isn’t really any prob­lem with child preda­tors — just a tiny hand­ful of highly pub­li­cized sto­ries — on MySpace. It’s just secu­rity the­atre against a movie-plot threat. But we humans have a well-established cog­ni­tive bias that over­es­ti­mates threats against our chil­dren, so it all makes sense.

To the right is a thumb­nail of a pic­ture show­ing the allowed wan­der­ings of the chil­dren in one fam­ily through recent gen­er­a­tions. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing comparison.

Thanks for the image, Carl (orig­i­nally from the Daily Mail)

Jan Pettit’s list of fears, ranked from child­hood through par­ent­hood. I’m cur­rently some­where between 13 and 17:

13. Fear of sell­ing out
Desert­ing dreams.
Embrac­ing capitalism.

14. Fear of the dark (con­tin­ued)
Park­ing lots at night.
Deserted streets at night.
Apart­ments at night.
Houses at night.
Bed­rooms at night.

15. Fear of rejec­tion (con­tin­ued)
By lovers.
By bosses.
By friends.

16. Fear of being unloved

17. Fear of being unlovable

By now every­one knows that Sir Arthur C Clarke recently passed away — a truly sad event. How­ever, you may not have watched his ‘final mes­sage to earth’.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies are nec­es­sary, but not suf­fi­cient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many dis­putes and con­flicts in the world. Tech­nol­ogy tools help us to gather and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion, but we also need qual­i­ties like tol­er­ance and com­pas­sion to achieve greater under­stand­ing between peo­ples and nations.

I have great faith in opti­mism as a guid­ing prin­ci­ple, if only because it offers us the oppor­tu­nity of cre­at­ing a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I hope we’ve learnt some­thing from the most bar­baric cen­tury in his­tory – the 20th. I would like to see us over­come our tribal divi­sions and begin to think and act as if we were one fam­ily. That would be real globalisation…

He con­tin­ued his com­mu­niqué with three final wishes, the sec­ond of which was:

I would like to see us kick our cur­rent addic­tion to oil, and adopt clean energy sources. For over a decade, I’ve been mon­i­tor­ing var­i­ous new energy exper­i­ments, but they have yet to pro­duce com­mer­cial scale results. Cli­mate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civil­i­sa­tion depends on energy, but we can’t allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet…

via Wired Sci­ence